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Thanks to the Hiragana 42 resource from the TextFugu downloads page, I’ve managed to easily associate each kana with the romaji and their respective sounds, which is complimenting my time spent in the Hiragana section of Lesson 1. I’m a little disturbed by the “mutilated Santa Claus” for the ‘Ho’ kana!!! (Amusing, though.)
I’ve not memorised the dakuten yet, as I want to make sure I can pronounce Ra, Ri, Ru, Re, Ro correctly before I get ahead of myself. To help me with this, I’ve enlisted the help of a native speaker to give me private lessons. (I found them on ‘The Japan Foundation’ website directory of tutors.)
On the recommendations of others online, I have also purchased the following books, which will assist me at some point: ‘Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication’ by Taeko Kamiya; ‘All About Particles’ by Naoko Chino; ‘A Guide to Japanese Grammar’ by Tae Kim.
Any other recommendations to aid a goal for fluency?
Do you really need to pay for private lessons on how to pronounce ra/ri/ru/re/ro? You’re not going to be able to pronounce them 100% correctly till you’ve had a *lot* of exposure and practice, so I’d say just push on to the dakuten stuff now, it’s not really that difficult anyway.
The tutor is not solely for the pronunciation of that one area. I’m looking forward to some casual conversational skills instead of sounding like a phrasebook robot like a lot of video tutorials and podcasts want us to sound. I’m the kind of person who wants to build from the ground up and understand what makes up a sentence so that I can create my own. This is the key to fluency: the ability to be creative and be grammatically correct at the same time. :)
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